Nights at the Circus (43 page)

The tribe counted the passing of time by blocks of light and darkness, of snow and summer; since their almanac was that of the seasons and their exposure to the foreign devils who put fire in the bladder had not tempted them to adopt any other calendar, they observed the winter solstice with a great deal of ceremony. A large larch tree, leafless at this season, stood outside the god-hut, and, as the slit of light at noon grew daily less and less, the Shaman and his female lieutenant, his first cousin, opened up a number of boxes inside the god-hut and took out enormous quantities of red ribbons, and also of pendants of tin in various shapes of stars, crescent moon and moons and men and women stylised as gingerbread people. The Shaman encouraged Walser to help the other two clamber up the tree and hang these decorations from its boughs. Walser thought the tree would look even nicer if they stuck lighted candles to the boughs, too, but there were no candles to be had. Walser thought that Christmas must be coming, but he could not remember what Christmas was, and, of course, Christmas had nothing to do with it. The village would also remain in ignorance of that moment, now approaching with great speed, when the nineteenth century would transform itself into the twentieth.

You could not even say they were exiles from history; rather, they inhabited a temporal dimension which did not take history into account. They were a-historic. Time meant nothing to them.

At this time, the cusp of the modern age, the hinge of the nineteenth century, had a plebiscite been taken amongst all the inhabitants of the world, by far the great number of them, occupied as they were throughout the planet with daily business of agriculture of the slash and burn variety, warfare, metaphysics and procreation, would have heartily concurred with these indigenous Siberians that the whole idea of the twentieth century, or any other century at all, for that matter, was a rum notion. Had this global plebiscite been acted upon in a democratic manner, the twentieth century would have forthwith ceased to exist, the entire system of dividing up years by one hundred would have been abandoned and time, by popular consent, would have stood still.

Yet, even then, even in these remote regions, in those days, those last, bewildering days before history, that is, history as we know it, that is, white history, that is, European history, that is, Yanqui history – in that final little breathing space before history
as such
extended its tentacles to grasp the entire globe, the tribespeople were already addicted to tea and handy with imported firearms and axes which they could not make themselves, being essentially Stone Age people. They knew more than they said. The future was more present to them than they were prepared to admit; every day they drank it and they handled it.

So they were not quite in the same position as those American Indians who, that day in fourteen hundred and ninety-two, woke up happy in the belief they were the lone inhabitants of the planet, smug in treacherous security of the conviction that, because nothing had ever changed in their world, nothing ever
would
change, and so, in their innocence, were doomed. These Siberian tribespeople knew they were not alone and their lives had changed already, although, at this point in time, it still seemed possible their flexible and resilient mythology would be able to incorporate the future into itself and so prevent its believers from disappearing into the past.

The Shaman’s cousin finished making Walser’s shamanising gown. As requested, there were stars across the bosom and stripes athwart the skirt, although the Colonel would not have recognised the Old Glory in this incarnation, so thoroughly had the Shaman’s cousin assimilated the design motifs with the traditional iconography of the tribe. She ran out of tin before she finished the ornaments so she went on reindeer-back to the settlement of R. and bartered a dose for a new kettle. When she got home, she cut up the kettle and made lots of little bells out of the metal. She sewed the bells on to the gown at the shoulder blades, under the arms and at the elbow joints.

‘You must listen to the tinkling of the bells to find out . . .’ and here the Shaman looked amazingly solemn ‘. . . certain things.’

But the tinkling suggested to Walser that he prance and caper. She sewed a little tuft of feathers on either shoulder, too. Although they were supposed to help him levitate, Walser broke down and cried like a baby when he saw the feathers. Why was that?

The Shaman mixed pigments extracted from various earths, mosses, lichens and berries and began to paint the surface of the drum. On the upper part, he painted sun, moon, birch trees, willow trees and horned mammals of indeterminate species. On the lower part, he painted frogs, fish, snails, worms and men. In the middle, feet in the lower part and head in the upper part, he painted an anthropomorphic figure designed to travel easily between the two zones; this figure was human, or, at least, bipedal, with nothing about it to hint at whether it was supposed to be male or female, and of impressive size. In order to facilitate its journeyings, the Shaman painted wings on the figure, big wings, outspread wings, and painted in the wings with pigment of a dull yet vibrant red he obtained by grinding dried lice with a pestle and mortar.

This figure troubled and delighted Walser even more than the bells and feathers on his garment. He gazed at the drum for hours at a time, cooing and chuckling, as if exercising his new-born sensibility. He knocked and tapped at the drum with the furry drumstick, trying to persuade it to speak to him. Nothing doing. He smiled at the figure and danced for it, both with the bear and without him. Finally, extending his arms towards the painted being in a supplicatory gesture, he came out with, in English:

‘Only a bird in a gilded cage!’

Then a door slammed shut in his memory and, for the time being, he lived on as a tribal child, privileged only in that he was an unusually gifted one.

Next came the question of his cap, without which his shamanising outfit was not complete. The design of this cap must come from visionary inspiration, too, just as that for the rest of his outfit had done. The Shaman thought the best thing was to put Walser on a reindeer and let the reindeer itself judge where best to find the inspiration for the cap. When to do it, though – why, when else but the necromantic day of the winter solstice itself! when the sun temporarily laid low and strange beasts of night came out to frolic in the dusky air.

Since the winter had gone on for two or three months already, most of the villagers were ready for some fun when the late dawn of the winter solstice dawned; and, though the sun did not manage to heave itself above the horizon until well past the hour when, in a civilised country, they would have had their elevenses, it finally arrived in splendour. In almost too much splendour; so unseasonal was the weather that the Shaman, who’d been anticipating murk, felt oddly ill at ease, as if some kind of magic outside his control might be going on. However, the sunshine brought the villagers out, and when the Shaman and Walser were dressed up ready to go, a fair number of trippers gathered round them well supplied with odds and ends of picnic things. But the Shaman’s cousin stayed home, in order to fix her daughter up in the shelter some distance from the village where mother and baby must stay in seclusion for ten days after the birth, so that the evil spirits would never know anything had happened.

Walser’s reindeer, left to seek its own way, took them off in the direction of the sanctuary of the foreign devils and their accursed iron road. The Shaman was secretly disquieted yet, all the same, anything was possible, even a vision which would mean a shaman’s cap made up after the style of those of the conductors of the Great Siberian Railway, so needs must all troop along behind. Walser dutifully applied his lessons in looking solemn so successfully that the Shaman, for all his inner perturbation, felt a sentimental pride.

It was as fine a day as the region could contrive at the time of year – a sky as blue as a baby’s eyeball; pale, reticent sunshine that offered the bitter-sweet, Slavonic pleasure of evanescence, for it would be gone so very soon; and, today, the snow did not look a killing blanket but like a tender coverlet designed to keep the cold away from germinating seeds. The children scooped up snowballs and pelted one another. A snowball hit the back of the Shaman’s hat, procuring a jingle from his bells and a subdued titter amongst the small fry. The Shaman noted this token of disrespect glumly. Proud as he was of Walser, some sixth sense still told him the day might not go well. He was delighted when Walser’s reindeer veered away from the track to R. and started to plot a course in the general direction of the river; he perked up at once. All slithered and capered on in cheerful mood.

And then the radiant shadow of the implausible cast its transforming spell across the morning.

Out of nowhere, or out of the pale blue sky, or else issuing from the cool heart of the white, fragile sun, there came a voice raised in song – a human voice, a woman’s voice, a lovely voice. Such a voice you might believe would bring on springtime prematurely. A voice to quicken all the little flowers so that they came out of the snow to dry their petals. A voice to make the larches shiver with pleasure and stretch their branches like children eager to dance. All of revivification, all of renewal was promised by that voice.

A soprano voice and a pianoforte accompaniment.

Birds rattled and soared out of the branches through the brightening air towards the source of the music. The undergrowth rustled with the movements of small mammals and rodents as they, too, made their way to drink thirstily from the miraculous fountain of song. Even the reindeer, on their feet like snowshoes, quickened their flapping pace.

But, if the fauna and flora of the Siberian forest responded as those of the Thracian forest once did to the music of Orpheus, the human forest-dwellers were deaf to the mythic resonances, since these awoke no echoes in their own mythology. This music had no charms for them, nor did it soothe their savage breasts at all, at all; they scarcely recognised the Schubert
lied as
music, for it had little in common with the scales and modes of the music they themselves, at the infrequent request of the spirits, made on skin drums, flutes fashioned from the femur of the elk and xylophones of stone. As far as singing was concerned, they preferred an edge like sandpaper on a voice; the honeyed tones of the girl soprano did not strike
their
palates like honey. The magic of her song was alien magic and did not enchant them. However, it intrigued them, even excited them; they, too, drew, towards its source, pondering on how it might be the cacophony of uninvited gods who’d slipped across the border between the visible and the invisible on this unseasonably bright solstice. Each brow was furrowed, all lips pursed in query.

But Walser found he was shaking like the larch trees, for the music had the familiarity of a remembered dream. When he saw the dwelling in the clearing with its thatch of swooning tigers, it was so complex a vision he could not, at first, decode it, but kept his reindeer back a little as the eager and curious tribespeople swept forward.

The Shaman smelled a rat, however. He was accustomed to seeing, or seering, and then persuading others that they saw the same things as he; but now all those around him were seeing the same thing as he did, spontaneously. He thought that was odd. The piano, whose well-tempered scale set his teeth on edge, came out of somebody else’s dream, not his own dream, not any dream with which he was familiar. If it came out of Walser’s dream, then Walser was much further along the high road to full shamanship than the Shaman had realised. The homestead before them, the song that welled up from within it, the somnolent tigers on top of it and the odd-looking group of round-eyed individuals who now appeared from the direction of the river carrying blocks of ice containing fish, all this combined to unsettle the Shaman. He felt he was getting out of his depth.

When the round-eyes made their appearance, Walser felt as though an early thaw were softening his brain; uncertain what to think, uncertain even how to think any more, he urged his reindeer forward for a closer look.

‘Jack! Jack!’

She might have been mimicking wood-chopping, so little sense did it make to him. The music ceased on a discord; loud and clear in the sudden silence now rang out:

‘Jack Walser!’

His name, in the mouth of the winged creature. A sign! But it was not enough to make the Shaman happy. Accustomed as he was to negotiating with all manner of anomalous imaginary things, winged or otherwise, with heads of bears and feet of elk, torsos of fish and loins of the eagle, she, with her yellow hair, furred legs and plumage of bright, artificial colours only seen before on trade blankets, might or might not be inimical. Even if she knew his apprentice’s name, she was still making an, on his terms, unearthly racket. Besides all that, her ostentatious wings were not even functional; now they let her down unceremoniously in a drift, with a wet thud. Incompetence of the apparition! And now she was letting loose the angry tigers upon them!

Hastily the Shaman began to beat out a magical defence upon his drum as the tribals scattered this way and that, in disarray, emitting sharp cries of disappointment and outrage. Walser, who appeared seized by an ecstatic fit fully the equal of any the Shaman could throw, attempted to stay the headlong flight of his mount but to no avail; it did not stop running until it got back to the village, where it shrugged him off its back, heaved a great sigh of relief and went off to nibble moss. Walser rolled about on the snowy ground, giggling and sputtering. He took hold of his rabbit-covered drumstick and with its aid released a hymn of joy from his drum.

‘I have seen her before!’ he told the Shaman eagerly when the Shaman caught up with him. ‘I know her very well!’

The Shaman thought it very likely, but not that it necessarily boded well, for his apprentice was well on the way to overtaking him and could already drum out the secrets of the spirits.